Deep Dish poem-a-month

St Valentine's Eve, #4

I want to bring myself to say what's right
I meet you in a hall of my own mind
And do not give you comfort as I should
Then I hear you stir in the actual night.
But what might matter now, I don't say.
Perhaps you gave some hint  that we could return
To one another by small steps, again
Tonight, is that what I chose not to see?
By tact, as if our touch were accident,
We might discover what to do with arm
And leg, with hand and mouth, and all we've spoken
Would mean that lovers are the ones for whom
The difficulty of love makes love awaken,
Not those from whom it takes the will to mend.

Reginald Gibbons

Sparrow - new and selected poems, Louisiana State University Press, copyright 1997. Used with permission.

Prayer Before Bathing

Meat-fetor of a dog's breath;
the tristeza of a striptease;
an old man's gurgling rattling cough
that shakes him so wildly
he holds his sides and walks
in step with his convulsions
till they cease and he spits
on the sidewalk; blood
and gold dust on gauze
under the patient's hand,
where a surgeon had to cut
her ring away from the wound;
the old woman who sees the clock
reading  2:05 and in a little
girl's voice, a singing voice,
says loudly, "It's exactly
two o'clock!" and looks around
the room for an answer;
and every hope,
every book, ends with money;
and they say that the terror
in fairy tales is good for you;
and the priest walks slowly
across his campus and bends to pick up
each bit of stray paper and trash
on the path till with delicate
resignation he drops
his handful into a barrel;
and after the census,
when they take our names from us,
we must wash.

Reginald Gibbons
Sparrow: new and selected poems, copyright 1997, Louisiana State University Press, used with permission.